Connections. Keep 'em clean and get better signal transfer. Connections. Keep your lines of communication open and get da scoop on da poop faster. One of my deep-throat sources in the ultra-audio reaches is Oakland optomologist Jim Langham, owner of one of the first two pairs of Magico Ultimates. Jim's owned some of the best and always keeps his ear to the ground. He'd let on last year that Jack Bybee's had a powerline conditioner on the boards for a good number of years but been unsuccessful getting it manufactured. While numerous domestic parties had been approached or had expressed interest by themselves, all eventually failed for reasons of final pricing (too high) or specialized expertise (not sufficient). At the time, Jim described Bybee's attitude about the project as "ready to quit, with too much time wasted already to get it off the ground". Jim was listening to a prototype and called it hands-down the best of its kind he'd ever tried. Do I have to add that Jim's tried nearly all of the really good ones?

China to the rescue it became, eventually. To get the final end user pricing well below $3,000 rather than above $10,000, Jack Bybee had to go offshore. Working out final production details is why he came to Vegas and he called me excitedly last week to confirm that the project's officially a go. Core features include precisely regulated, zero resistance, phase-locked balanced power with less than 0.0001% of total harmonic distortion. What's fed to your equipment is a pure 60Hz AC sine wave and nothing else. That shortens rectifier charge times in the power supplies of the connected equipment and thus, rectifier noise pollution. Regulated means that while accepting input swings from 95 to 135V from the power utility grid, the active BybeePower unit will only output a steady 117V. Zero resistance theoretically means "that noise from one component would see a dead short enroute to any other component. In this way, each component would be isolated from the others as though operating from separate power sources. BybeePower has only 0.01 ohms of resistance, providing near perfect isolation between components."

Bybee voltage regulation "allows the line frequency and phase to be preserved while completely rejecting all traces of noise. The first part of the process is to sample a small amount of the incoming AC voltage through a very sensitive limiter. The result is a square wave output. Since the limiter is in compression nearly 100% of the time, power line noise is rejected to an exceedingly high degree. Moreover, the limiter is out of compression only during a very short period of time around the zero crossing of the AC. Since the zero crossing is the portion of the AC cycle least contaminated by noise, the resultant square wave is nearly perfectly quiet.

"The second part of the process is to filter the square wave through a 16th-order continuous time harmonic filter. The result of this process is an extremely pristine sine wave which is a suitable standard by which to evaluate and correct the output voltage of the power conditioner. Any error in its output voltage is readily detected by subtracting a sample of the output voltage from the reference voltage. The error thus determined is fed into a high-gain high-current amplifier, the output of which is connected in series with the secondary winding of an isolation transformer. In this way the error voltage is subtracted from the raw line voltage before it is fed to the power conditioner output.

"The reference output is split into two outputs, one of which is phase inverted. From there the remaining aforementioned processes are duplicated so that separate anti-phase outputs are generated for the hot and neutral lines." In conclusion, BybeePower does not regenerate AC by storing the new waveform in digital memory to involve D/A conversion nor does it completely regenerate power to avoid the need for huge amplifiers (or the Class D solution to high power which introduces its own switching noise). BybeePower uses voltage correction to only treat a portion of the incoming waveform and reduce the burden on the internal amplifier. Idle power consumption of the BybeePower unit is 55 watts and even at full power, 75% efficiency is maintained.